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December 25, 2007

I've been saving this post, because I hope that you all got Yotsubas for Christmas this year. In a perfect world, all of you guys, indeed, everybody in the world, would be familiar with Kiyohiko Azuma'sYotsuba&!. Unfortunately, this is probably not so-- you slackers get on that immediately. Yotsuba&! is the simple story of a strange child of indeterminate origin, and her adventures in the real and very mundane world. It's about simple pleasures: seeing Yotsuba start a newspaper or imitate action movies with her water gun or crusade against global warming or befriend a cardboard robot that runs on money. Nothing much in particular happens, but that's not the point. Like it says in the back of the book, you're supposed to enjoy everything.

I enjoy Yotsuba so much that I went out-- ie: to HLJ-- and bought the only figure that was available at the time: a little tiny figure that came with an issue of Dengeki Daioh a couple years back. I hear it's worth a lot of money now! I don't know where I put mine! I guess I can't take that picture of it sitting at my tiny toy arcade cabinet!

Mini-Yotsuba was nice and all, but thankfully Kaiyodo saw the market's need for a real Yotsuba action figure. Yotsuba's been released as part of the Revoltech line, a line typically reserved for robots and badasses. But Yotsuba needs to move around too! Yotsuba is an action kinda kid, and to that end, she moves everywhere. The shirt is actually a flexible piece of plastic, to allow for an even wider range of movement. Yotsuba can kick you in the face! Yotsuba can hold up Devilman for his change! Yotsuba can imitate Noriko-- but she can't really cross her arms effectively!!(devilman and noriko not included desu~)

As you can see up there, the accesories loadout is wonderful. Yotsuba comes with a replacement angry face, her water gun, a stick of ice cream, replacement hands to hold them with, and a spare joint that I didn't really check where it goes. You want to re-enact the "you can tell me in hell!" scene? You got it.

All in all, this is a pretty brilliant figure: the sculpt is spot-on to Azuma's color illustrations, the accessories are all perfectly series-appropriate, and you're a fan of Yotsuba at all you should probably have one. Next in this line: the mighty Danboard! I'm waiting for the US release, but Japan's already got it. Hell, they've even built Great Danboard out of five lesser Danboards. Amazing.

December 18, 2007

Now that we've got my slow day out of the way we can talk about Sunday, which is actually, unusually, going to be a lot more interesting. Sunday, the con closes at 5, and you see the whole place crumbling down in front of you the whole time you're there. The dealers are busy getting rid of stuff, which, what the hell, let's get right to it, actually kind of started a miniature riot.

Central Park Media, which is perpetually closing out its mountain of dead stock, started handing out stuff to passers-by. By the time I got a phone call about it, the crowd was already around 50 to a hundred people deep. Stacks of one item-- a script from some anime episode, one of the old CPM comics, promo CDs and the like, were literally crowdsurfed down, and if you wanted one you took it. Of course, there weren't enough for everybody, which meant that we very quickly descended into a grabbing, pushing mob scene.

Now for an MD Geist artbook I'd normally do what it takes, but I'd just had LASIK surgery on my eyes, and I didn't exactly want to risk, you know, a poke in the eye permanently ruining my vision. So I hung close to the back, kept my sunglasses (the surgery made me a vampire for a week there) in the pocket of my hoodie, and got what came. I managed an old A-Ko comic and the Japanese script to Munto II, which I've never seen and likely never will. Anyway, the problem is that the back is only really quiet until other people show, at which point it is only the middle of the mob. This didn't take long to happen. A Naruto cosplayer, ever stealthy, shoved in front of me, knocking my sunglasses out onto the ground.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

I couldn't have those things off me for longer than fifteen minutes and they were about to be trampled. I squatted, and I shoved my elbows out, catching Naruto in the gut. This was extremely satisfying for a variety of reasons. After retrieving the sunglasses, I got the hell out of there.

Immediately before this I had caught the Kaiju Big Battel panel. Those guys were as much fun as they've always been: playing to a tiny crowd that mostly didn't get it at all, Louden Noxious and the Beav gave all their hard work and guts to tell us everything there was to know about painkiller addiction, the underground club scene, and how to Analyze, Realize, and Conceptualize in the event of an actual kaiju attack before bravely leading us in a march to their table at the dealers' room. Apparently I missed their last NY show, but they claim to be coming back to the city soon. Here's hoping it works out: I still have the cardboard building they threw into the crowd the last time I was there.

This whole report is turning into a list of things I didn't do, but I guess it's worth mentioning: by the time the afterparty was upon us, I was all out of money, and even half-price drinks at some wap-bar couldn't move me anywhere but home.

All in all, I'd call it a "meh" convention: the biggest thing is that for a huge, for-profit con in an absolutely gigantic space, it was awfully small and short, and frankly paled in comparison to the fan-run cons I've been to. The structure made it clear that the con was there for the dealers' room, and all the other stuff was kind of an aside. That's fine: that's your source of income. Even so, I'd like to be kept busy for my $50. Too often, my friends and I were faced with the choice of "do we kill time in the dealer's room or do we kill time in the maid cafe?" Sure, you're gonna end up killing time at cons, but I killed nearly all my time at NYAF.

Sorry about the delay, you guys, but now that finals are mostly over I can get back to my important cartoon business.

I missed a lot of Saturday, unfortunately. Woke up late, left stuff I needed at home: basically, I took about three hours longer than I should have to get there. The con shuts down really early and 4 PM, by their standards, is already halfway in. I'm sure there's some reason they can't get the place for longer, but compared to the other cons I go to, it's kind of a bummer to have all the fun cut off at eight.

The difference between Friday and Saturday is that there were actually people there: I guess you really have to call the con a success at this point, having seen the sheer numbers out there. People were even lining up for Javits' $7 waffles. I even lined up for Javits' $7 waffles. Some Gravitation cosplayers tried to get in front of me! True story! The place was really alive in a way that I didn't see again until a particular moment on Sunday that we'll get to. I know that the Saturday-only pass was a popular option for a lot of people: about half of my friends opted to only show up on Saturday and they didn't miss too much.

Of course the first thing that happens when I get there is I go to the game room and find out they've started the Virtua Fighter tourney without me. My pal Rodney was already there, and he's an incredibly strong player: there wasn't exactly any competition for him. Being that he was a strong player they gave him the slack they had refused to give me earlier: custom stick and custom controls. This in mind, they structured the tourney like so: everybody walked up with their pads and fought Rodney and lost. Then they gave him a prize, but like Ryu, he left right before the awards ceremony.

I like to look at the schedule as I write these things, and I realize that I didn't do anything that was on the schedule on Saturday. Seriously, nothing. I missed everything I wanted to do, from catching Catblue Dynamite again to the Otaku USA panel to even the showing name that made me laugh the most:

Bloodhound: The Vampire Gigolo.

I repeat:Bloodhound: The Vampire Gigolo.

I bet it takes itself very seriously. Upon some research, it turns out it's a J-drama, and Bandai made the same mistake that Badass Manly Anime Reviewer did in labeling host club employees as manwhores. I haven't really enjoyed a single J-drama I've watched, so, uh, I think I was better off not knowing this. I could have just said the title for years. Let this be a lesson to you all: knowledge is terrible, and so are people who think Densha Otoko is going to happen to them.

I did spend some time in the dealer's room with an buddy who was agonizing because there just wasn't anything in the dealer's room for him: this tends to happen when you own every single figure of Saber on the market.

In summary, the part of Saturday I remember most clearly was the udon I had in Brooklyn afterwards.

December 09, 2007

Listen to some City Pop while you read this con report, and just relax, man. It's gonna be alright.

New York Anime Fest is a first-year con that was intended to be really big, but was, in fact, really small. They got a huge chunk of the Javits Center, and yet the theme of the convention seemed to be "empty space". Friday was the worst of these: the place was a ghost town when I first walked in around 2 or so. The first of the few panels I hit was the gekiga panel, where I was, awkwardly, the first and only guy in the room for about ten minutes.

It was right here, during this panel, that it hit me: you know, how this con works and how it's just nothing like the anime cons I'm used to. This is very much a for-profit venture put on by Reed Exhibitions, who put on the wildly successful NY Comic Con. As such, they want to keep a squeaky clean public face (just try not to notice the porn in the dealer's room, okay?) and they wanted our hosts to keep the panel strictly PG. This is sort of impossible. This is gekiga: dark, creepy, and often-- regularly, in Kazuo Koike's work-- outright bizarre. As such, the guys could never really get into specifics, and while the audience got a nice general idea, it was impossible to really express to them the depths of coke-driven stab-a-man-in-the-balls-and-howl-at-the-moon crazy that Koike gets to, or the severity of the desperation of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's protagonist: the horrific and fascinating and awful and sometimes totally hilarious lows that we see these men at. Gekiga was written for old men who are goddamn tired of the world, and I sympathize with that.

Right outside of the panels you've got the maid cafe, which I sort of made some noise about. I was pretty sorely disappointed: what the place really was was a glorified snack stand with some girls in maid cosplay hanging out at the entrance. In other words, not a full-service location, but with the prices at Javits, the full Onii-Chan Experience probably would have cost as much as a car. To their credit, the girls did their "irasshaimase!" and "arigato gozaimashita!" very nicely, and were obliging enough to pose for a loverly group shot while I fumbled around like a jackass with this camera I never use. The entertainment was provided by ADV in the form of the really awkward dub of Kanon and the appallingly poor Venus Versus Virus. There was one other show, but I was never on that end of the cafe. It was where they were serving the food, you see.

I went to the dealer's room with two purchases on my mind:

-DVDs of Machine Robo: Revenge of Cronos, which the most recent episode of Anime World Order had completely sold me on: see, one of the robots is a jet, and his name is Blue Jet, and he's a samurai, and he's red. Thankfully, AWO's own Daryl Surat hooked me up with the spot to buy said DVDs, and the job is done. The show is everything I'd imagined.

-That figure of Rei Ayanami where she's doing a trick on a BMX bike. It's so stupid that I know, eventually, I have to own it. One dealer's advice on finding it was "Good luck, man," and he was right. I couldn't find it anywhere. The internet, on the other hand, is full of them, and I think I'll be putting in an order very soon.

I actually found myself getting a lot of nice little surprises: a print of Giant Robo fanart, a free Diebuster poster just because I asked, an old Gundam artbook from back when the fans were awaiting the final movie of the original trilogy with bated breath, and a $5 Cutey Honey figure. Not a bad haul at all.

After that I hit the game room, which was run by the New York-Tokyo group, which puts on a lot of little gamer shows around the city. The lineup was kind of oddball but the highlight was probably, for me, finally being able to play Culdcept Saga on the 360. I loved this game to death on the PS2, and with online play, I know it's going to turn out to be a serious contender for all of my free time, right up there with Virtua Fighter 5. Speaking of which... not such great tournament setups. I asked about using the Hori stick I'd brought and changing the buttons to the arcade layout, but I was told that it wouldn't be fair to the other players that I got to change the buttons to make the game playable. Huh? Well, as it turned out, there weren't any takers for VF5 anyway. Tourney canceled. What a bust: I figured I was a shoo-in.

At the end of Friday, there was a major case of bad scheduling: the whole con was closed with the sole exception of the Masquerade. Organizers do this with big events because they think that the event is so big that everybody will want to see it and there's nobody who wouldn't want to be there. This is always an incorrect assumption, and most cons are smart enough to at least schedule a few other events during the Masquerade. But tonight, there was no choice. We would have left outright, but we were waiting for some friends, so eventually my friends and I found ourselves sitting in the back. I'm glad we were back there, because hoo, boy.

I've come to terms with the idea that the things that I want from an anime con and the things that the majority of anime fandom want from an anime con are just in completely different worlds. I know that it's all 16-year-old girls who really like Kingdom Hearts 2, Shonen Jump fight shows, and guys from both of those making out. I can make peace with that idea. That's their thing, and my thing is robots punching each other in the face. We can live in harmony. Until the masquerade. The masquerade just goes too fucking far. The masquerade is, by and large, the most unbearable pile of wank the fandom has to offer. If you're reading this you probably know what the masquerade is, but let's be sure: cosplayers go up on stage and do little skits for about three hours. Not all of them are bad, but most of them are absolutely horrendous: if all entertainment is 99% crap, then the masquerade is a hyper-refined 99.9999999999999999999999999999999% crap alloy. Plot lines include "we are dancing", "we are guys kissing", and save the Evangelion interpretive dance, that was really about it.

To add insult to injury, this one was MCed by an "otaku comedian" who was really just Otaku Dane Cook: his jokes were along the lines of "hey guys, SEPHIROTH," and then all he had to do was wait for the crowd to laugh hysterically, which they always did. I expect him to join up with the Scary/Date/Epic/Piece of Shit Movie guys and make Otaku Movie, in which cosplayers make faces at a camera and say their characters' names repeatedly for 90 minutes.

So you've got to do something while this is going on, and I just sat back, popped my headphones, and played Super Robot Wars on my DS. My buddy next to me watched Lucky Star on his portable media player, and eventually, god help me, I joined him. It was better than the show on stage!

The other attraction was Pictochat, which was interesting, because there was actually quite a lot of quiet heckling (gems from the cosplay crowd included complaints about inappropriate uses of satin and exhortations to "IRON THAT SHIT") and a whole lot of people who hated being there as much as I did. On that positive note, we left about an hour in, while the MC was reciting a 10-minute poem about Batman.

December 02, 2007

It's a lazy Sunday afternoon, so why not sit down and watch an old video promo/strategy guide for Virtua Fighter 2? It's got funky AM2 music, awesome English, super techniques, and if you're not careful, you might just learn something. Five ten-minute parts here, and I've only embedded the first, so be sure to click and check out the rest of it too.